Major SCOTUS wins for religious liberty, life, and sovereignty—three cheers for Donald Trump and Cocaine Mitch! Democrats are left with nothing but talking points and mob violence. Is the US headed for civil war, or are these the good old days? We'll analyze. Then, the NYT's calls Trump gay, Donald Glover gets accused of plagiarism because This Is America, and Michael analyzes the end of liberalism as Ireland's former president calls infant baptism "child abuse."
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My fellow Americans, it is with a heavy heart that I report that San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, they've all been reduced to rubble by the deluge of leftist tears following the recent Supreme Court rulings on Christian bakers and abortionists and Somalian travelers.
Chicago looks basically no different.
But a difficult day nonetheless for left-wingers.
We will analyze this supremely good times that we're living in and give three cheers for Donald Trump and Cocaine Mitch.
We've got a lot to talk about today.
We're going to analyze everything from there to the end of liberalism, why infant baptism is a violation of human rights, how the Democrats have nothing to run on, and we'll probably all drown in the tears.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
In a special live stream this coming Monday, don't miss it, Monday July 2nd at 7pm Eastern Eastern Time, we will be joined by special guest Jordan Peterson to celebrate Independence Day.
God King Jeremy Boring will host a new edition of Daily Wire backstage with Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, and little old me to look back on our country's birth and look ahead to its future.
Subscribers will even be able to write in live questions for us to answer on the air.
That's right, write in your questions for me, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, the God King Jeremy Boring, BAM, and Jordan Peterson.
Again, this is Monday, July 2nd at 7 p.m.
Eastern, 4 p.m.
Pacific with special guest Jordan Peterson.
Do I need to say that again?
We're going to be serving lobster.
It's going to be a delicious dinner.
You can find our special live stream on Facebook and YouTube.
Do not miss it.
Okay, we have, guys, we have got so much to get to.
We can't go yet.
We can't cover everything yet.
I'm too excited.
I've been ready for this show since I woke up and started dancing on my bed this morning.
But before we get to all the news of the day, we've got to thank Dynatrap, a wonderful sponsor that I use every minute of the day in my apartment.
Dynatrap Indoor Flylight.
It may be the greatest invention in the history of the world.
I don't think that's an exaggeration.
I'm really not kidding.
I have these things all over my place.
In Southern California, we have an issue, especially when you're in LA proper, of flies in the summer.
Flies just infest, especially certain parts of LA. I think it's because this is just Gamora by the sea, and so there's so much evil.
It manifests in all these flies flying around.
Dynatrap indoor fly light.
It's the greatest bug catcher I've ever used.
It's fabulous.
Summertime is officially upon us, and you've got to make sure that you catch these little buggers.
So, we'd like to thank Dynatrap.
It's the leading manufacturer of outdoor mosquito and insect traps.
I've been using it now for probably a month and a half.
I can't tell you the sort of stuff I find, but what's so good, in the old days in New York, I would have that fly tape, you know, and you'd catch, like, just giant bugs, and you'd just look like the lowest of the low-class people, bugs hanging, you know, to ornament your house.
I don't know who thought that was a good idea, to just ornament your homes with bugs hanging around everywhere.
We probably could have watched that because that doesn't even begin to capture the deluge of leftist tears that are pouring out today.
We could have probably watched the whole movie, Deep Impact, and it wouldn't have quite gotten to it.
I'm really glad I have my Tumblr.
I hope that you have your Tumblr, too.
For those of you, I suppose, who were listening...
You know what that was.
That was the deluge of leftist years.
Let's get right into it.
To begin, three cheers for Donald Trump and Cocaine Mitch McConnell.
Three cheers.
Hip, hip!
Hooray!
Hip, hip!
Hooray!
Hip, hip!
Hooray for Cocaine Mitch and Donald Trump because they gave us Neil Gorsuch.
Cocaine Mitch.
That's the only way I'm going to refer to him from now on.
Cocaine Mitch, he stalled out.
Barack Obama tried to pressure everybody to put his left-wing justice on the Supreme Court.
Merrick Garland and Cocaine Mitch said, nope, you're a lame duck president.
We're going to wait for the next guy to come around.
And by the way, people thought, oh, it's going to be Hillary.
Just do it.
Come on.
Merrick Garland is relatively moderate.
Oh no, this is awful.
You're robbing Obama of his ability as a president.
Blah, blah, blah.
Never mind that Joe Biden advocated exactly the same thing when George Bush was president.
Said, no, you're a lame duck.
We're not going to take any of your court nominees.
Cocaine Mitch stood firm.
And I've got to tell you, folks.
He walks like a turtle.
He talks like a turtle, but I got wise.
He's the devil in disguise.
Oh, yes he is.
He is.
He's such an operator.
Mitch McConnell, you know, conservatives get frustrated with Mitch McConnell because he probably isn't like a rock-ribbed conservative ideologue.
I don't really know that he has these hardline conservative political philosophy.
When he first ran for the Senate in the 1640s, he was a moderate.
He said he was a centrist.
But what he's really, really good at is politics.
And right now it is politically advantageous to be conservative.
And he is one of the most effective people at enacting conservative public policy in this country.
He's done a really good job.
And we can thank him for this court appointment.
He said very wisely, he said, you know, the winners make policy and the losers go home.
And this is to some of his conservative critics.
But he's been great.
I mean, really, really good.
And President Trump for nominating all of the Trump critics on the right.
They said, oh, Trump will never nominate an originalist.
He'll never nominate a textualist judge.
No way.
He's going to work with the Democrats.
No, blah, blah, blah.
And then what did he do?
He gave us a great originalist judge in the vein of Antonin Scalia, whom he replaced.
Really good stuff.
So right now, the Drudge Report especially, but a lot of conservative outlets, they're focusing on how the Supreme Court upheld the travel ban, President Trump's travel ban.
You could call it Obama's travel ban.
It's the same thing, right?
I mean, this is not...
The left is calling it a Muslim ban, but you'll notice that most Muslims in the world can still travel to the United States as often as they want.
This is a ban from these terror-ridden countries that don't have proper vetting procedures, so we just don't know who's coming in and who's coming out.
Poor vetting has destroyed Europe in the last 10 years, and it's caused some trouble in the United States too.
This is a perfectly normal policy.
It's a policy that the Obama administration pursued as well.
They're calling it the Muslim ban because they're just so upset.
But I gotta tell you, other cases are more important So it's true, the Supreme Court gave us a win here, but it's much more important that the Supreme Court upheld three other cases within the last couple weeks.
And we'll take a quick look at those.
The first one, 73-year-old Baronelle Stutzman, Washington State florist, who had served her gay friend and customer for a decade, I think.
And then he said that he wanted her to arrange flowers and flower arrangements for his gay wedding ceremony.
And she said, oh, well, I don't That violates my religious beliefs, so I don't want to participate and give my artistic endeavors to participate in something that I consider immoral.
And it was a really hard thing, and they cried, and she was really friends with him.
And then this guy's worse half, not his better half, but his worse half, insisted that they bring suit and sue this woman out of house and home and just destroy her life and livelihood.
Fortunately, the Supreme Court came around and vacated the ruling that held her in violation of the law.
And they said, no way, she's not in violation of the law, so that goes back to Washington State.
This is a big win for religious liberty in this country.
This is a huge win, you know.
The left is really hypocritical on this point, right?
Because that guy, what's his name, the Spider-Man guy who was on Broadway in Angels in America, Andrew Garfield, he comes out and he says, come on, let's just bake a cake for everybody.
Come on, hey, shouldn't we just bake a cake for everybody?
Until they don't want to.
And then all of a sudden it's, yeah, we're going to kick Sarah Sanders out of our restaurant.
Yeah, that'll show you that at least the Supreme Court here is saying if you have religious beliefs, you don't have to violate them.
That's a big, big win.
Thank you.
Another similar case, this came out a little while ago, is Jack Phillips.
He's the baker from Colorado.
They seem like the same case.
It's the same thing.
He doesn't want to cater gay weddings and doesn't want to participate in them with his services.
And the Supreme Court found that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission violated his rights and discriminated against Jack Phillips.
Another huge win for religious liberty.
You know, this country was founded on religious liberty.
Even if you're an atheist, even if you're agnostic or you don't really care...
That is essential to the fabric of the United States.
It's no coincidence.
This place was founded by people who all they wanted was religious liberty.
The pilgrims who came over here from Leiden and the United Kingdom, they wanted to be able to practice their religion freely.
It's woven into the fabric of the United States.
It appears again and again throughout U.S. history.
Ann Coulter once gave me this advice back when she was talking to a group of students who were, you know, You know that fashionable thing where you're socially liberal but fiscally conservative.
That's like the first step on becoming a conservative.
And so she was talking to them.
She said, look, even if you are in favor of abortion, if two candidates are offering to lower your taxes...
And one of them is pro-life and one of them is pro-abortion.
Vote for the candidate who's pro-life.
He'll lower your taxes more.
And what she meant by that is there's a coherent political philosophy and political philosophies.
That are on the right side of the aisle.
So religious liberty plays a big role in this.
Even if you don't really care, you don't go to church, you don't whatever, it's woven into the fabric of the United States and to oppose religious liberty is ultimately a left-wing position.
I know you want to be fashionable or something, but no, I'm cool.
I like anything that's gay, I like that.
Even if it's in violation of the Constitution, I like...
Don't fall for that trap.
That's a trap of the left, and the Supreme Court has given us another day of freedom, which is a big win.
Then, probably the best one of all is in California.
My own state.
When do we ever get good news in California?
Never.
I just had to go and, you know, right now, basically, if you've ever owned a firearm in your life, the California state is going to tie you up and put you to the Grand Inquisition.
It's not great for conservatives out here, but we've just got a major win, which is that the Supreme Court...
That California law, the FACT Act, is not constitutional.
So the case was the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates versus Becerra, the Attorney General of California.
And the question at play is whether this California law is legit.
This law that says that crisis pregnancy centers and pro-life and non-abortion providing health clinics have to advertise abortion.
The FACT Act says if you are a pro-life, Catholic, whatever pregnancy center, you have to say, hey, you can go get an abortion.
Go get an abortion.
You have to sort of, you know, advertise it.
And the Supreme Court found, Justice Clarence Thomas, I think, wrote the opinion of the court, that this is in violation of the First Amendment.
You don't have to do that.
I don't have to advertise for abortion.
This is a huge, huge win.
All of that before we get to the one that everybody's tweeting about.
And the one that everybody's tweeting about is this travel ban.
Travel ban is Trump versus Hawaii.
The Supreme Court's decision today reverses the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision.
The Ninth Circuit, you know, left of Lenin.
Pretty left-wing court.
And it reverses that.
Keith Ellison, the vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
Not some wacko.
Not even just some congressman.
Not some activist on the street.
He's one of the heads of the DNC. He tweeted out and he said, The U.S. Supreme Court just ratified Donald Trump's total and complete shutdown of Muslim entry into the United States.
That isn't true.
Indonesians can come to the United States.
That's fine.
Malaysians can come to the United States.
Muslims can come into the country.
If you're from Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, or Yemen, then it's going to be a little tougher for you to come into the country.
Why?
Because there aren't vetting procedures in those countries right now.
Because they're basically all failed states to come into the country.
Now, I notice a few things about those countries that are on the travel.
They're calling it the Muslim ban.
One of the heads of the Democrat Party is saying it's a total and complete shutdown of Muslims in the United States.
Does North Korea have a huge Muslim population?
I didn't know that about North Korea.
How about Venezuela?
Is Venezuela like a hotbed of...
Radical Islamic activity?
I don't think so.
Not at all.
And by the way, this first came about with the Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act of 2015.
This was during the Obama administration.
They were identifying countries like this to have restrictions on their travel.
It makes perfect sense.
You can't have somebody coming over from a failed state and legitimately protect your country.
The left tried to make a big issue about it.
Now what Keith Ellison is saying is that it's all Gorsuch's fault.
Of course it's Gorsuch's fault.
And it's because he's serving his paymasters.
That's the word he used.
His paymaster.
Who are Gorsuch's paymasters?
Just the U.S. taxpayers, right?
He's a federal judge.
He just gets paid what a federal judge gets paid.
But then Keith Ellison, you know, he's the first Muslim elected to Congress.
And he compared this ruling to Plessy v.
Ferguson, or the Dred Scott decision.
Upholding, you know, Just destroying black people's civil rights, you know.
After 9-11, Keith Ellison compared George W. Bush to Hitler.
This guy has a history of making these insane statements.
But right now, a lot of the left is going along with this.
There's, oh, this Muslim ban.
They don't know anything about this ruling.
They don't know anything about the history of this policy.
This is not a huge deal.
Right now, even the people in the commentariat on the left, who are the ones who are supposed to be, like, normal about this and have some context, Matthew Iglesias at Vox.com, he tweeted out...
The theft of Merrick Garland's Supreme Court seat is legitimately the greatest heist in the history of the world.
Now, I need to, the theft of Merrick Garland, see, Merrick Garland was first nominated and then, you know, we booted him because Trump got elected and then we got Justice Gorsuch.
I've got to ask, because I, not five minutes ago, the left was telling me that the 2016 election was the greatest heist in the history of the world.
And before that, they told me the 2000 election was the greatest heist in the history of the world.
And basically, whenever something happens that they don't like, they tell me that it's the greatest heist in the history of the world.
Which one is it?
Is this the greatest one ever or is it not?
The stolen...
See, I gotta tell you, Matthew Iglesias, don't you make me play that Joe Biden clip.
I'm not gonna do it.
It was played so much where Joe Biden said, this president is a lame duck and we're not going to deal with any of his Supreme Court nominees.
Don't make me play that.
I'm going to play that clip.
I'm going to make a whole episode of that clip if you keep this up.
David Axelrod came out.
He tweeted, he said, as one after another, five-four rulings of the Supreme Court on voting rights, abortion rights, the travel ban, and more are announced.
The full meaning of the Senate majority leader's unconscionable, nearly year-long blockade against the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland is manifest.
David.
Don't you make me play that Joe Biden clip.
Don't you make me do it.
Because it's just utter hypocrisy.
And one thing that's worth pointing out here is that I don't think the Merrick Garland-Neil Gorsuch issue would have changed this decision at all.
Perhaps it would have changed a decision on the abortion case in California.
Maybe it would have changed the decision on the florist or on the baker.
It is pretty bizarre that there are four left-wing judges who say, yeah, we've got to compel you to participate in gay weddings.
We're going to compel you to advertise for abortion clinics.
That is pretty weird.
But on this issue of whether the Trump federal agencies can restrict travel from certain dangerous places...
I'm pretty sure Merrick Garland would have gone along with the majority of the court.
He would have done exactly what Gorsuch did.
And here's why.
This was reported, I think, in Politico.
Ronald Rotunda, who is a Chapman University professor of law, he wrote, I don't think Merrick Garland looks at who is president.
I think he's deferential to executive power, to the power of the executive branch and the agencies to do what is certainly within their purview.
He spelled this out at...
I think the 80s at a Harvard Law Review article.
Akhil Amar wrote about this and talked about this long before Trump came around.
Merrick Garland...
This is a fairly open and shut case.
I don't think this is a big...
It's become a big political issue because it's been misrepresented by talking points.
But it actually isn't one of these, you know, touch-button issues.
So...
That's all they have.
All they have are these sound bites.
I'd like to point out the pinnacle of this.
The New York Times.
The New York Times used to be a newspaper, as Andrew Klavan points out.
And they are now investing money creating these short little cartoon videos, like Cartoon Network, like Saturday Morning Cartoons.
Here is what the New York Times, as all of these public policies are up for discussion, up for grabs, this is what the New York Times is spending its time producing and showing to its readers.
I know words.
I have the best words.
Do you have a relationship with Vladimir Putin?
I do have a relationship with him.
And I think he's done a very brilliant and amazing job.
He's put himself, really, as a lot of people would say, he's put himself at the forefront of the world.
If you can't see what's going on on the screen, it's this cartoon of a shirtless Vladimir Putin, and now a shirtless Donald Trump, and they're holding hands, they're riding together on a unicorn with rainbows going around.
They're both shirtless, by the way.
They're almost naked.
Trump is in his underwear, and they're smiling, and now they're kissing.
Now they're kissing really closely and there's fire between their lips.
And now you can see their tongues are...
I can't even describe this as graphic as it is.
They're twirling around one another, their tongues and their open mouths as they kiss.
And Donald Trump then cuts back to him and he's sitting on his bed making kissy faces, almost naked, and watching the television.
Then he shoots the TV. That's with a shirtless picture of Vladimir Putin on the wall.
This is produced by the New York Times.
This isn't something that appeared in the New York Times.
This is a production of the New York Times.
And this gay obsession is really bizarre and pretty ironic.
So you've probably noticed this over the past couple years.
All of the left is obsessed with...
Mike Pence and Donald Trump and gay stuff.
All of this gay imagery.
This started because Mike Pence, however many years ago, said he might support some law that as part of it gave certain funds to certain therapy programs for people who were suffering from sexual confusion.
And they turned this into, Mike Pence wants to electrocute gay people.
I don't know how they got there.
That's what they did.
And obviously the culture right now is obsessed with gay sex.
You've seen the Pride weeks over the last...
All anyone cares about is gay sex.
Not North Korea, not foreign wars, not the economy, not entitlement programs, not marginal tax rates, not health care, just gay sex.
That's the only thing that anybody can talk about.
That has become the sacrament and the idol to the left.
But the irony here...
Is that in this video, the New York Times is criticizing Donald Trump, they're insulting, and they're attacking Donald Trump.
This isn't just a sort of saying, oh, I don't really like his travel ban.
This is saying, we hate this guy, and we're going to make him look like a big, fat, naked blob.
But the way that they insult him, the part that they think this is the best attack we can make on Donald Trump, is they call him gay.
These are the same people telling us it's great to be gay, and gay is beautiful, and gay is wonderful, and gay is good.
And then on the other hand, they're saying, yeah, you know how we're really going to insult Donald Trump?
Ha ha, you're gay.
Ha ha ha.
Hey, Trump, you're gay.
Ha ha ha.
Like you do in second grade, like school kids do when they're like eight years old.
They say, ha ha, how gay.
I don't know that they understand the irony of that, but this is the attack.
And it's so gross and so small.
Because the New York Times, which used to have some prestige, I don't really know why, but you know, it was a serious thing.
They put good words together, they had good writers.
It's now basically become the Occupy Democrats' Facebook page.
There is no real difference anymore between the New York Times and the Occupy Democrats' Facebook page.
It's just, they spent who knows how much money producing a video over a minute long with all this illustration, a totally animated video, to call Trump gay.
That's it.
That's what they're doing.
That is so pathetic.
Meanwhile, back in reality, the attacks that Maxine Waters called for on Republicans are already happening.
They're already manifesting.
So Maxine Waters says, yeah, you're going to go out.
I want Democrats to go out whenever you see a Republican, whenever you see a conservative, in the street.
I want you to get right in their face, scream at them, scare them, physically intimidate them, terrorize them, go to their homes at night, scare their families, keep their families awake.
This is the kind of stuff she's saying.
There was a huge mob of protesters and rioters outside of Stephen Miller's apartment.
White House aide Stephen Miller.
There's a camp out now in Portland, Oregon, of Occupy ICE demonstrators.
So the immigration enforcement, there's a camp out.
They're going to occupy this whole area.
And it brings up this question.
Are we headed for a civil war?
And I say this with a straight face because major figures are suggesting it, major cultural figures and political figures.
Steve King from Iowa, I think he's from, he's just come out and said, we're headed for civil war.
We've got Harper's Ferries coming up, and after Harper's Ferries, Fort Sumter.
Harper's Ferry was the raid on John Brown in 1859, and then Fort Sumter was when the Civil War began, 4.30 in the morning, April 12, 1861, when the South basically started firing on a national army stronghold at Fort Sumter.
And are we headed this way?
It is true the left seems to hate us.
And I don't think it cuts both ways.
I don't think, oh, we all hate each other.
I don't think it's those ways.
I think that the right considers the Democrats kind of useful idiots, as they've always been.
Useful idiots for Lenin and Stalin and all the bad people on earth.
Now they're useful idiots for, you know, for Trump.
For Venezuela, for Cuba, for all of our enemies.
Steve Schmidt, the former Republican who's now a big Democrat, he's basically saying the dictator regimes in Venezuela and Cuba, they're better than the United States.
They've always been useful idiots.
But that's what the right thinks of the left.
And the left thinks that the right are evil, vicious, sick, psychopath monsters.
I don't think that about the left.
The left does seem to think that about us.
It's why the Nazi comparisons are all over the place.
Are we headed for civil war?
I don't think so.
I don't think so.
I mean, Steve King, part of his evidence for this is that there's an Occupy Weirdo rally in Portland, Oregon.
That's the definition of Portland, Oregon.
It's just wacko Occupy Weirdo rallies, right?
If families were sitting down having a tea party and playing cricket, that would be the stranger thing in Portland, Oregon.
So I don't think we have it in us.
I don't think, first of all, the right has all of the guns in this country, but I don't think that the left really has it in them.
I think they're just behaving like petulant children.
Petulant children can be really annoying, and they can be destructive, for sure, but they don't pose an actual threat or an existential threat.
They're just going to mess things up and draw on crayon all over the wall, but they just don't have it in them.
Even the name Occupy, right?
They don't even move.
They're just sitting there kind of weak and...
I don't see us heading for civil war.
I think, unfortunately, our culture is too decadent for civil war.
I guess that's a good effect of a decadent culture, is that you're not really going to all start killing each other.
But we're just too accustomed to luxury and sitting around and getting whatever we want on our phones.
I don't actually think we're there.
We're just in this kind of cultural malaise.
But...
But things around us are going very well.
What are Democrats?
Democrats are the party of talking points.
At this point, they're the party of talking points.
The total Muslim ban.
He's a Nazi.
He's Hitler.
It's all, it's all, check your privilege.
It's all just...
You know, the obsession with the 2016 election was stolen.
The judicial seat was stolen.
It's a theft.
What about Russia?
But then you ask them, just like I asked Tom Arnold on the show, I said, what's your evidence?
Go a little further, and they fall apart.
They don't have anything.
They only have talking points.
That is basically a good thing, I think, for the ascendant right.
Because right now we can say they're behaving like crazy people.
Sure, they behave like crazy people and everything goes well.
All the public policy that we want is happening.
I think conservatives always want to catastrophize things.
I think we're going to look back on this time in history like a Carly Simon song.
Like the song Anticipation.
We're going to be there and say, Anticipation is making me wait.
We're going to look back and we're going to say...
Stay right here because these are the good old days.
You know, these are the good old days right now.
The economy is doing great.
We're making these huge political wins, huge victories for American liberty, religious liberty, founding constitutional liberty that we thought were impossible two years ago.
It's happening.
This is good stuff.
And you shouldn't miss it.
I hope you're not going to miss it because you're going to look back in 10 years and say, man, it was pretty good.
It was pretty good.
I wish I'd been smiling around then.
We should take the wins while we can get them.
Got a lot more to get to.
Donald Glover, Childish Gambino, that guy who made that stupid music video, is being accused of plagiarism because this is America.
And I also want to talk about the ends of liberalism, the philosophical end of liberalism, which is saying that infant baptism is a violation of human rights and that changing a baby's diaper requires consent.
These are serious things that major figures on the left, in some cases, are talking about.
We'll get to all that.
Before we do, I have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
You're going to miss Childish Gambino.
This is America.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Tune in for this show.
You can tune in for that excellent backstage hangout we're going to have with Jordan Peterson.
You're going to want to ask questions.
You're going to want to ask questions in the mailbag.
You're going to want to see me, the Andrew Klavan show, the Ben Shapiro show, the conversation.
None of that really matters.
You just need this, guys, because these are the good old days, and you're going to be bloated and floating in the good old days if you don't get your leftist here's tumbler, because you've got to protect yourself, man.
It is wet and salty out there.
Go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back.
Maybe that'll be the new motto of the show.
It's wet and salty out there, the Michael Knowles show.
Michael Knowles show, wet and salty.
Make of that what you will.
So Donald Glover is getting sued for plagiarism.
I love this.
You remember the song that came out a little while ago?
This is America.
And it was like, America's really bad, and all we do is kill people, and it's racist, and it turns black people into just minstrel show puppets, and America's really bad, and wah, wah, wah.
Well, it turns out he stole the song.
He's getting accused of plagiarism right now.
So he's being accused of plagiarism by people who listen to another song by Jace Hartley.
You're not familiar with Jace Hartley?
Neither am I. But he did a song called American Pharaoh.
And just judge for yourself.
The first one is Childish Gambino, This is America.
The second one is Jace Hartley, American Pharaoh.
See if you can tell the difference.
This is America.
Don't got you slipping off.
Look how I'm living off.
Police be trippin' up.
Yeah, this is America.
Runs in my area.
I got this drive.
Hey.
I'm young and I'm black in America.
They try to attack and embarrass us.
Y'all don't want your daughters to marry us.
But they love this .
So I tear it up.
Got her wedded and mariners.
Half of society scared of us.
My .
Young with no barriers.
So if you owe me money, just .
Police killed my best friend, they shot him dead.
I do not forgive, I do not forget.
My life is a cliff and I'm by the ledge.
And in less than a moment, a lot is sad.
It's the same song.
It's definitely the same song.
And Donald Glover, who also goes by Childish Gambino, he's like the worst thief ever because he kept part of the name of the original in the name of his song.
So without attribution, without acknowledging that it was obviously influenced by, in a good way, or just a ripoff, of American Pharaoh.
American Pharaoh by Jace Hartley.
This is America by Donald Glover, Childish Gambino.
There's a great irony here, right?
The This Is America song is all about how America is just a place of theft.
It's a place of oppression, stolen labor, stolen property.
It's all guns, right?
Taking things at the foot of a, at the barrel of a gun.
And then what does he do?
He steals the song.
Maybe I'm not giving him enough credit.
Maybe this is a real piece of meta art.
It's really art about art, and he's really making this commentary.
I don't think so.
I think he just stole it.
Now, Jace Hartley's been very nice about this.
He said, Hartley said...
That this is, you know, he's proud that it influenced the song, and he would have liked a little shout-out, but that's okay, whatever.
And it is true, it's really hard to prove these cases.
I don't know that Donald Glover's actually going to have to pay anything out.
And it's really hard not to be influenced by other music, especially when the music is as bad as this.
The fact that this music is so bad is actually part of the reason why it's hard not to steal.
So, you know, other musicians, this happens all the time.
Musicians hear a ton of music, then they write something, and they don't even realize they're rewriting something else.
George Harrison did this on the song My Sweet Lord.
He was obviously influenced by the song He's So Fine by the Chiffons, where he seems to have been influenced by it.
And by the way, those two songs are way...
More different than American Pharaoh and This Is America.
But why is that?
Because those two songs have music in them.
Those two songs, you know, My Sweet Lord has guitars and piano, and it's got melody, harmony, and rhythm, right?
It's actually music.
And so does...
He's so fine by the chiffons.
So they sound kind of similar, but there are little differences.
All this has is rhythm and talking.
It doesn't even have a melody.
It's just talking.
This is America.
I'm a Michael Knowles.
There's no music to it.
If Childish Gambino had stolen the beat, the rhythm of it, but he had changed the melody and the harmony, then you'd say, okay, whatever, that's fine.
He's been influenced, but he's building on something.
But he can't even do that.
If he takes the beat, he's got the whole song.
Because there's very minimal music in the rest of the song.
I get great joy out of this thing.
It's bad news for the culture, because our art really has decayed.
I talked about this a little in the mailbag last week, but since World War I, there hasn't been art in America.
There's just been anti-art.
This is an idea that Jacques Barsin talks about in From Dawn to Decadence.
After the First World War, all art becomes destructive or deconstructive or it just mocks what happened in the past.
But in any case, it's just working on what's already there and making it worse, either by parody or by playing around, removing pieces or by knocking the whole thing down altogether like Dadaism.
And you're seeing the fruits of that.
I mean, you're just the opposite of fruits of that.
You're seeing the rinds and the cores and the rot of that in American Pharaoh and This Is America.
Really fun stuff, though.
Go defend that.
You're lucky, Donald Glover, that you have an American criminal justice system.
And that Jace Harley isn't just going to go out and beat you because you clearly took his song.
Before we go, we've got a couple minutes left here.
I do want to talk about infant baptism.
This is a thing, you know, this is a normal way to end the show.
You want to talk about infant baptism.
There is a story out now that Mary McAleese, Mary McAleese from Ireland, she was the former president there, She was president from 1997 to 2011, presiding over the total decay and destruction of a formerly Catholic country.
She has come out against infant baptism.
She said that infant baptism is a violation of human rights.
For those in the audience who don't practice infant baptism, infant baptism is practiced by the Catholics and the Lutherans and the Anglicans.
Methodists, Presbyterians, at least probably a few others, and it's been practiced for, oh, now 2,000 years.
And, you know, you baptize little babies into Christ, and that's to give them grace, you know, and endow them with grace.
And this is apparently a violation of human rights.
This is the logical end of liberalism.
And I'm not saying leftism, I'm not saying nihilism or subjectivism or whatever, like all these things that we usually say.
Liberalism.
From classical liberalism all the way to the present.
This is the natural end of that.
So here's what McAleese said.
She said, infant conscripts who are held to lifelong obligations of obedience.
You can't impose, really, obedience, obligations on people who are only two weeks old.
And you can't say to them at 7 or 8 or 14 or 19, here is what you contracted.
Here is what you signed up for.
Because the truth is they didn't.
And it's not just her.
She's not just some wacko.
Richard Dawkins said the same thing.
He said that infant baptism is child abuse.
Raising your children in religion is child abuse.
This is the natural end of liberalism because you see these themes that come from the beginning of liberalism.
In the 16th century, the modern era of emancipation and individualism coming to insane, absurd fruition here at the end.
You know...
St.
Paul describes baptism as replacing circumcision, which happens to babies, right?
You used to circumcise your babies, now you can baptize them.
St.
Peter writes about this.
He says,"...for the promise is to you and to your children and to all that are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him." Even if someone isn't at the age of reason or isn't able to reason himself into making a formal decision to go to church, it can be done for them.
People who are mentally retarded, this can be done for them.
People who are little babies, this can be done for them.
But even on the right now, in certain versions of Christianity, There's this idea that you have to make the conscious choice as a conscious individual to free and emancipate yourself from the bonds of sin and go and engage yourself as an individual in the church and in the body of Christ.
This is a total modern crazy notion.
This also comes to fruition when activists say that when you change a baby's diaper, they have to give consent.
Here's an activist with silly hair talking about that just a while ago.
I'm going to change your nappy now, is that okay?
Of course the baby's not going to respond.
Yes mum, that's awesome, I'd love to have my nappy changed.
But if you leave a space and wait for body language and wait to make eye contact, then you're letting that child know that their response matters.
Oh God.
This is the end of liberalism.
This is the end of individualism and emancipation.
You know, now on college campuses, I think whenever you're going to pick up a girl at a party, you have to have a notary public by you so they can notarize the consent.
It's usually about a 400 or 500-page contract that you have to sign before you can buy somebody a drink or kiss them on the cheek.
Say, would you like to go back to my apartment?
I've got seven cameras on you now, so we have total proof and the notary's over here.
It's all this obsession with The individual, the individual choice, the individual determination, the individual emancipating himself from the society, from the culture, from the strictures that society puts on you, that's all modernism, and it all ends up like this.
This is the logical end of that.
And there is an alternative.
You know, in the modern era, the last 500 years, that's all we've focused on.
And I'm not just talking about the left.
I'm talking about classical liberalism, too.
The libertarians do this.
They say, I own my body.
I had Jason Stapleton from his libertarian show came on, and he said, I own my body.
But you don't own your body.
That's just a fiction that you begin with.
That's the myth that you're choosing to begin your political philosophy from.
But it is nothing more than that.
It's just a story that you tell yourself.
You don't own your body.
You didn't make your body.
You didn't come up with the idea for your body.
You got it through an act of abundant grace.
It isn't you.
Someone else gave it to you.
Somebody else made you.
And you didn't save yourself either.
You didn't redeem yourself.
You were bought at a price by somebody else.
And when the modern era has tried to forget that, or tried to erase that, or tried to create a society that denies that, and it did that through liberalism, but liberalism has an end.
This is the craziness of it, and therefore I think we have to rethink some of our initial assumptions, and that way we won't end up asking our little babies if they consent to have their diapers changed.
Or, you know, be brought up by the UN Human Rights Commission because we want to baptize our children.
Alright, that's our show today.
We've got some really crazy guests coming up soon.
And I mean like crazy in the really good way, not like the bouncing off the walls kind of way, as some other guests may have been.
Come back tomorrow.
Get your mailbag questions in so we can answer them on Thursday.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Semia Villareal.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer, Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Jim Nickel.
Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
